Finally, it won’t be any of the candidates and especially the international candidates who sounded the most these days. The new director of the Reina Sofia Museum, who will succeed Manuel Borja-Villel after his bitter and controversial departure, will be the Galician Manuel Segade (A Coruña, 1977), director of the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Móstoles since 2015, when he replaced Ferran Barenblit, who has just now been another candidate in the running to lead Reina. The Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, will today propose Segade to the Council of Ministers as the new director of the flagship of Spanish contemporary art for the next five years.
Segade was the candidate who obtained the highest score during the selection process carried out by an international committee of experts and will now have to take the complicated reins of an institution that has closed rooms and has been semi-paralyzed since the departure, after 15 years at the helm, of Manuel Borja-Villel, who, once his term ended, finally decided not to run for the new contest and not opt ​​for another five years in the face of a fierce campaign by some media framed in the current culture wars.
In fact, the Popular Party’s campaign spokesman, Borja Sémper, had asked just yesterday to postpone the appointment of the new management of the Reina Sofia until after the elections on 23-J, but Minister Iceta pointed out in the afternoon, after announcing the winner, that just to have postponed the decision “would have been to politicize an appointment and this is a process that began on February 10 with an international committee of experts who made us a proposal and we opted for the person who has obtained the most points in this process, there is no better guarantee of independence for the museum than this”.
“My election demonstrates once again that in contemporary culture what is apparently minor or geographically peripheral constitutes a fundamental contribution,” Segade emphasized yesterday after learning of his election. Graduated in Art History from the University of Santiago de Compostela, he has served as programming coordinator of the Metronome space of the Rafael Tous Contemporary Art Foundation in Barcelona and as chief curator of the Galician Center of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela. In addition, he has curated numerous exhibitions in national and international institutions for two decades, such as the one currently dedicated to Juan Muñoz at Sala Alcalá 31 of the Community of Madrid.
Segade has published articles, catalogs and books, among which stand out Narciso Fin de Siglo (Melusina) or Las infinitas especies (Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló). And it has a special mention in the Outstanding Museum Practice Award of the International Committee of Museums at the CA2M – dependent on the Community of Madrid – in 2021 for the projects developed in response to the pandemic.
The international jury that chose the five finalists, among whom Miquel Iceta selected the one with the highest score, was formed by the Swiss Christophe Cherix, head curator of Drawings and Prints at MoMA; the Mexican Cuauhtémoc Medina, head curator of the University Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City; the Polish Joanna Mytkowska, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; and by two Spaniards, the historian, curator and critic Glòria Moure, who was director of the Galician Center of Contemporary Art, and by the curator of architecture, design and urbanism MarÃa Nicanor, current director of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum of New York.
